Fun5,

If they were planted as fry, the expense required to gather fish to mine the eggs and milt, fertilize them, grow them to fry, and plant them would be spent to get a return that is almost as low as the same percentage if they were allowed to spawn naturally in the river.

While the hatchery fish that return may be of a much better quality than those that are released as smolts, there are two problems with it.

For one, they would be enormously expensive, relatively speaking, because the expense incurred would have almost no better return, if better at all, than if we let Mother Nature do it for free.

Secondly, they wouldn't be clipped, and that would make it impossible to differentiate between hatchery and wild fish, which besides not making much sense biologically, since we couldn't truly evaluate what the wild run is doing, but would be illegal under existing law.

Fish on...

Todd